The Mentality of the Culicidae

It's 3am, and I'm awake. Again.

I used to be the type of person who would lie awake at night thinking about things. I have this goal of "understanding", so puzzling things out is a natural instinct. And hey, I used to have things to think about. The MUD, for instance. Why on earth did this player say that? Was that what he thought of me? Why would he think that, did they really think I was so selfish? How could I make them all see the person I really was? Et cetera. Or when I had a crush on a boy when I was fourteen, now, that really gave me something to think about. But that was long ago, and it's not why I'm awake tonight.

No, tonight there's a mosquito in my bedroom. Again.

Now, I like to think of myself as a nature-lover. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of visiting the Botanical Gardens with my family, being taught about the different trees and flowers, feeding the ducks. When I was lonely in primary school, there was a patch of buttercups far across the field from where everyone played, and I would retreat there when the age difference got too intrusive for me, and keep the bees company. And I like cute and cuddly animals as much as the next girl.

Actually, I've probably quite a bit more tolerance for the wildlife than your average person; too much David Attenborough as a teenager, I suppose. (No, you can never watch too much David Attenborough.) So, in accordance with his enthusiastic attitude, I find it all interesting, curious and worth preserving (although I haven't gone vegetarian). This means that I don't mind large spiders, because the big ones we get here are harmless; in a safe environment, I wouldn''t mind handling a snake. To me, ants' nests are a marvel of nature, as you can see in this video, although obviously they're best left alone. I like earthworms, in theory, although I've never bothered digging them up to go look at them. By a weird extension, I like colorectal surgery. (Seeing the patient's innards spread out on view... Pink and wriggly? Happy guts. Ooh, that bit looks sick, poor thing. Let's cut it out. The rest of them still happy? Happy guts.)

But well, mosquitoes are the lone exception. They spread malaria, causing a worldwide disease burden. Not to mention myriad other diseases. They don't support any ecosystem, as far as I know, because they're a pest feeding on humans and animals. They seek me and my mother and sister out preferentially, and we get huge welts that last for days and sting at night. I don't believe in "evil" in the malignant, people-hating sense, but ... mosquitoes are the enemy and must die.

Which brings us to The Hunt.

The door is closed. The lights are on. All wooden surfaces get checked. Then Smith gets covered in blankets up to his face, and my arms and head are free to act as bait ... and to smack them out of the air. I used to be reasonably good at it. When I was on rotation on the North Coast, in a house with broken fly-screens, I'd sit for an hour before bed and get about six or seven of them each night. Then I could sleep knowing that with the door shut, no more would come in.

These days, though ... I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm older and slower. Maybe I'm tired more often. Maybe the mosquitoes are faster, where we live now. But many hours over many nights have been fruitless, and I usually end up just putting a blindfold on and going to sleep with the lights on. I don't think I've caught a mosquito this year, and there have been plenty.

So I've had plenty of time to think about the intelligence of the mosquito. Obviously it's not on a par with the human mind. I must be some kind of animist, because I usually like to think of things as having a personality - trees, germs, guts (as above), supermarket trolleys, you name it. But well, I don't even like to dignify a mosquito by giving it its proper gender (only the female ones bite). No, this is not your average gravid female looking for nourishment for her eggs, and this is not a bitch-slap fest. It is an IT. Kill it.

There used to be a catchy television advertisement for insect spray, that featured an anthropomorphic, singing housefly. I'm Louie the fly, Louie the fly, straight from rubbish tip to you! Spreading disease, with the greatest of ease ... But when you're in a room with a mosquito ... well, it's not exactly a planning genius.

"Right, we go around the bedpost here and between the slats, and they'll be straight ahead. Ignore the golden-haired one, the Asian one has a better blood group, taste that carbon dioxide on her breath ... So we're going to zoom over the face, we don't want her to wake up, focus on the hands, arms, anything but the head, you got me? And do not, I repeat, DO NOT land on the hair - it's a trap. They're not called hair triggers for nothing. Okay, you ready?"

No, I like to think of a mosquito more as a machine. In its nervous system and what counts for a brain, it has, what, ten thousand neurones? A hundred thousand? I don't really have a clue, although I bet it's not in the billions. And there are probably only a few basic impulses - eat, mate, hide. Each one would have excitatory and inhibitory factors, and you can kind of predict what they are.

Anyone who's done neuroscience probably knows what I mean by that, but here's an analogy. Mating aside, let's say that 'hide' and 'feed' are at opposite ends of a dial. What the mosquito does depends on where the dial is at a particular time, and that depends on the environment. The time of day is one factor pushing the dial towards one end or another - feeding at dawn or dusk, and hiding the rest of the day. The presence of food pushes it towards feeding - I've just looked it up, and apparently carbon dioxide and oct-1-en-3-ol in breath and sweat are strong attractants. I used to watch them come up to me, mesmerised, tracking along the trail of my breath - conveniently, right in front of my face so I could smack them between my hands.

Obviously being swatted at is a fast swing towards the "life-preservation" end of the dial, but also, the presence of a good place to hide will attract it. I've learned that mosquitoes like to hide on dark wood-grain surfaces, and I used to be able to go hunt them down on my bedroom door or the bookshelf. (Now my bed is wooden and there's an underneath for them to hide. Grr.) And, to my despair, having the light on (so I can see it!) seems to be a strong push towards the 'go hide' end. Maybe having a 35 watt fluorescent for sewing and reading as the top light (100W incandescent equivalent) wasn't such a good idea.

Other than that, I'm guessing. I suspect that while light is a fast swing to the hiding end, darkness is only a slow push in the other direction. I wonder if the strength of the light is a factor in the speed. Sometimes I wonder if they're tempted to hide on my hair, being a dark, grainy surface. I haven't yet gone as far as digging out my tiny stash of acupuncture pins and opening a vein to attract it despite the light, but tonight I'm tempted. It did come out when I had a nosebleed earlier tonight, after all.

That only accounts for about fifty neurones in total, so obviously a mosquito is more complicated than that. But I've got a hundred billion ... I win, right? Well, that's what I'm hoping...

neeed ... sleeeep.....

I've been cleaning!

*does a happy dance* I'm so proud of myself!

Okay, as you can see by the washing corner in the bottom picture, I'm not a clean freak. And from the previous posts you can see that I do an average of one chore per day. This is despite being at home with nothing to do.

Yes, I have lots of things I could be doing, and no particular duties. What I end up doing: playing Insaniquarium and reading the Internets.

In fact, Smith is the tidy one in this household. He hardly puts things down out of place (except that his end-of-the-day clothes pile is next to his computer chair. I can cope with that.) If anyone does chores in this house, it's usually because Smith noticed they needed doing, and it's usually Smith that ends up doing them. Or he'll set aside a weekend and we'll do them together. Sometimes he'll say 'Can you do the washing today?' before he goes to work and that'll be what I do that day. But today...

Today, I set myself more than one chore to do. The dishwasher needed doing again as there were no clean bowls, and Smith mentioned that he'd like the washing done. I know that the floor needs vacuuming, but I hate it, so I said to him (apropos of nothing) 'I don't want to vacuum.' He agreed to do it (sometime) and I said I'd tidy the floor so he could (sometime). Also, as Smith was sorting through the clean clothes pile looking for socks, I said to him on a whim, 'Today I'm going to tidy up that pile.' (It was in front of the wardrobe in the third picture, and took up nearly all the floor space you can see there.)

Well, I didn't really have a timeframe for that, other than 'today' for the washing, dishwashing and the clean clothes pile. And I didn't start out in a housework mood, either. We went for our walk, which was lovely. I told Smith one of last night's dreams along the way, and he talked about Dark Angel. After our shower, I just felt like going back to bed. So Smith helped me towel my hair, and I hopped back into bed.

I lay there for a little while, before thinking 'Now that I've exercised and not eaten, if I sleep now it'll be tough to get out of bed later.' So I hopped back over and got a peach, and a book (I've been looking for a particular quote. Still haven't found it) and snuggled back into bed.

After I'd finished the peach, I started reading for a little while, looking for that quote. Then Smith left for work at about 8.30, and I figured, okay, I'd eaten, had my goodbye kiss, I could sleep now.

Lay there a little while longer, and then thought, hmm. I'll just put the washing on, and then I can sleep. Got out of bed to put the washing in the machine.

And as I was sorting the washing pile, I thought to myself, this wasn't so hard. And I realised that my body wasn't actually tired. My mind was, though. Perfect time to do something mindless, like housework!

And then ... while sorting the washing ... I saw a mosquito. In my bedroom. I hate mosquitoes with a passion, they are one of the few living things I can't tolerate. I get a huge (2-3cm) reaction to a mosquito bite within five minutes, although it will gradually die down if I put cold water/soap on it. And they always bite me, not Smith. (Either that, or he just doesn't notice.) So if I see a mosquito in my room, I will hunt it down and kill it.

This one went and hid in my bookshelf. (They like to hide on wooden surfaces, sometimes in plain sight if forced to land.) When I moved the books it flew out, just within reach. I smacked at it inexpertly, and hit it with one of my hands (the other didn't connect in the right place). I think it fell down somewhere, stunned. But I don't know where! I moved some things about on the floor (there was a little bit of visible floor) but it wasn't enough, I didn't find it. That was when I decided that today, I would tidy the whole room. I opened the window, let the natural light in, and after I'd put the washing machine on, I set to work on the clean clothes pile.

I think it was while I was doing that, that I noticed how dusty the plastic horizontal blinds were. (Or maybe I noticed it while I was in bed reading, before I closed the curtains to sleep. Anyway.) Now, normally I don't dust. It would, in fact, be more accurate to say that I 'grime' - that is, I only remove dust with a wet cloth, when it is in quantities that would count as 'grime'. But ... I'm allergic to the house dust mite. Having a blocked nose used to wake me up 16 times an hour at night (or something. I don't know what the number actually means.) We now have hypo-allergenic pillows, pillow protectors, a new vacuum cleaner and two nose sprays, and I sleep much better.

Anyway, while I was picking up dusty clothes with the window open, and sneezing, I was thinking, 'The breeze is nice, but the dust from the blinds is blowing all over my bed.' And when I went and looked ... it was grime. It's amazing how much dust two humans can generate, and that window doesn't even get street pollution grime because it's mostly closed.

Luckily, I had a set of bed-sheets that needed washing, so I slung them under the window to protect the bed and the floor, and set to work with my wet sponge. Note to self: sheets, ready to be washed, make good dust-protectors when cleaning. After a little while I had to make a face-mask out of a tea towel to protect my nose, too, but I got the job done. Boy, were they yucky. There was now less dust in my bedroom!

Of course, I still had to clean the floor, so I'd done it in exactly the wrong order, even if you're supposed to clean top-to-bottom. But, as you can see in my photos, I succeeded! I didn't even have to hide stuff in other rooms - most of it stayed in the bedroom. There was one set of clean sheets that went out into our storage cupboard, but apart from some other little bits of rubbish, that was about it.

Eventually it became a game of 'what can I clean up so that I can take a photo to show Smith'. (I'm going to teach my kids that game.) And now the bedroom floor is clean, and ready for vacuuming! All in all, it took less than two hours. I was done by 10.30; since then I've hunted for the camera, taken photos, worked out how to transfer them to the computer, put the dishwasher on and written this blog. 12.30 and I've achieved all I wanted to, today. No, it's not a lot. It's a lot more than this time last week, though.

My mind also gradually woke up as I was doing the mindless stuff, but now that I've written all this hopefully I'll be able to take a rest. Off to find something for lunch, and then sleep, I think.

I never did find that silly mosquito, though.